Like many who work at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Aristotle Voineskos joined the first moment he could, and hasn’t left since.

The son of a longtime CAMH psychiatrist, Voineskos was comfortable around mental health and illness long before he decided to pursue it as a doctor.

“Just being in the building as a young person, walking by people suffering from the illness,” he says, “that made an impact on me — seeing them and watching them get help.”

Flash forward a few years and Voineskos has built his own lab with experts from different scientific backgrounds — engineering, biomedical, statistical, biological, physics and computers — and has already been part of exciting advances in schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s and bipolar disorder in his field of genetics and brain imaging. “We want to understand how the brain works when people clearly have mental illness,” he says.

Voineskos, a winner of the prestigious Polanyi Prize, has recently obtained funding for two clinical trials to use brain imaging and genetics to help with new treatments — one involving magnetic pulses applied to the brain in an effort to improve memory in people with schizophrenia — as well as to understand existing treatments.

“I’m still early on in my career,” he says, “but a lot has happened for us in the past three to five years.”

Aristotle and his father are not the only Voineskos at CAMH; Aristotle’s sister, Daphne, is a fourth-year resident currently working in the newly opened Temerty Centre for Therapeutic Brain Intervention. One of her interests is plasticity in the brain — how it rewires itself and how, in particular, the process works, or doesn’t, in schizophrenics. “Why isn’t their brain reacting accurately to the environment?” she says. “It makes them shut down and withdraw, not engage in relationships, not come to appointments. They’re really the highest-risk of schizophrenics.”

Voineskos’ goal? Develop bigger and better treatments for these people, who currently don’t have much available to help them. And the Temerty Centre is where she’d like to achieve that goal.

“CAMH is unique in Toronto especially in that it’s not just a department of psychiatrists — it’s a whole hospital of psychiatrists with so much expertise,” she says. “Finding out the person who’s teaching you is the person who wrote the chapter in the textbook you’re reading just provides this unique learning and unique clinical experience for us.”

Dr. Jason Joannou wasn’t planning a career in psychiatry, but when he did his first clinical rotation in the field, he says, “I really, really loved it. It was a bit of an eye opener for me.” The patient contact appealed to him, as did the “fascinating” diseases they encountered. He also loved the “ambiguity and acceptance of ambiguity” that is part of psychiatry.

During his two years at CAMH, Joannou has seen people who are suffering in the worst way from mental illness in his work with the general psychiatry and acute care unit. “Forty per cent of people who end up at CAMH go through our care,” he says. And they treat everything from substance abuse cases and psychosis to mood, personality and anxiety disorders. “It’s very rewarding to work with them,” adds Joannou. “They come in very, very sick and often can get much better very quickly. That’s not always the case in psychiatry.”

Joannou is also the postgraduate psychiatric coordinator, in charge of all the residents at CAMH. “It’s a great opportunity and very rewarding in terms of how education in such a large institution works. It’s a wonderful experience for a novice psychiatrist.”

Being the first female Aboriginal (Ojibway Nation) psychiatrist in Canada — and only the second Aboriginal psychiatrist, period — wasn’t something Dr. Cornelia Wieman set out to achieve. But as soon as she got into medical school and became involved with the Native Physicians Association of Canada, it became clear that more help with mental health issues was needed in that community.

“By and large people just kind of managed as best they could,” says Wieman, who is assistant professor in the department of Public Health Sciences at the University of Toronto and co-director of the Indigenous Health Research Development Program. “They’ve been so underserved that consumer awareness around how to access services and interact with health-care professionals has had to come a long way in a short time.”

Although working in Sioux Lookout is part of her job at CAMH, where she has been since March, Wieman is focusing on the Aboriginal population in downtown Toronto. She calls it an “incredible privilege” to be one of the few Aboriginal psychiatrists in the country, but one that comes with a great deal of responsibility. “I’m walking between two worlds constantly,” she says. “It’s been challenging for sure. But I’m already starting to see the benefits of working within an organization receptive to reaching out to aboriginal people, rather than trying to accomplish it on my own.”